Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their
causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of
people killed. But the question remains, if the main goal is death,
then why is torture necessary? This book argues that genocide and
mass atrocity are committed not as an end in themselves but as a
means to pursue sustained and systemic torture - the spectacle of
violence - against its victims. Extermination is not the only, or
even the primary, goal of genocidal campaigns. In The Macabresque,
Edward Weisband looks at different episodes of mass violence
(Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, post-Ottoman Turkey,
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, among other instances) to consider
why different methods of violence were used in each and how they
related to the particular cultural milieu in which they were
perpetrated. He asserts that it is not accidental that certain
images capture our memory as emblematic of specific genocides or
mass atrocities (the death marches of the Armenian genocide, mass
starvation in the Ukraine, the killing apparatus and laboratories
of the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia) because such
violence assumes a kind of style each time and place it arises.
Weisband looks at these variations in terms of their aesthetic or
dramaturgical style, or what he calls the macabresque. The
macabresque is ever present in genocide and mass atrocity across
time, place and episode. Beyond the horrors of lethality, it is the
defining feature of concentration and/or death camps, detention
centers, prisons, ghettos, killing fields, and the houses, schools
and hospitals converted into hubs for torture. Macabresque
dramaturgy also assumes many aesthetic forms, all designed to
inflict hideous pain and humiliating punishments, sometimes in
controlled environments, but also during frenzied moments of staged
public horror. These kinds of performative violations permit
perpetrators to revel in their absolute power but simultaneously to
project hatred, revenge and revulsion onto victims, who embody the
shame, humiliation and loss felt by their torturers. By
understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for
its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many
seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity
across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly
through history.
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